I think this is the big difference. For the really successful companies, their proprietary engine is their baby, and they have teams spending dozens of hours every week trying to improve its performance, squashing out bugs, doing refactoring, etc. I’m thinking of companies like GrindingGearGames and DigitalExtremes who’ve been on their engines for over a decade and continually push improvements with every major update.

I simply don’t believe that work is being done at Bethesda. I’d be shocked if it was. It feels like they treat maintenance of their engine as some kinda punishment they make junior devs go through or something. At this point, they’ve accumulated such a mountain of technical debt that it might honestly be more efficient for them to start from scratch, which is a pretty damning statement.